When Willard Carleton Orr graduated from Bangor High School in 1939, this is how his yearbook described the ambitious 19-year-old:

“Debater par excellence, Carleton can also put his thoughts on paper. Witness his senior essay. And he’s already established in something unusual – a steady job.”

The National Honor Society student, and active member of All Souls Congregational Church, may already have known he would never grow old. Just before Christmas he left his family’s residence at 57 Seventh St. and enlisted in the Army Air Forces, rising to the rank of private first class before shipping off to a faraway place many back home had never heard of, but soon would never forget – Pearl Harbor.

On Sunday, Dec. 7, 1941, Orr was working as a head cook at Hickam Field, Hawaii, when the first wave of Japanese dive-bombers began pummeling the base at 7:55 a.m. He was cut down, not with a rifle in his hand, but probably a spatula or a potato peeler. The government simply listed his death as “DNB,” or died not in battle.

Communications glitches kept the awful news from Orr’s parents, brother and three sisters for nearly a month. In a cruel twist of fate, after his death they were encouraged when the postman delivered his Christmas card, mailed from Oahu on Nov. 24.

W. Carleton Orr is memorialized in the first page of the World War II Book of Honor at the Bangor Public Library, but otherwise remains only one of the more than 2,400 Americans killed at Pearl Harbor on a day President Franklin D. Roosevelt termed “… a date which will live in infamy.” All eight battleships in the harbor were crippled or destroyed, 188 planes wrecked and another 159 damaged. Only the three U.S. aircraft carriers, out to sea on maneuvers, were spared.

Americans have been mentioning Pearl Harbor a lot lately, beginning with a summer movie that was long on special effects but short on such historical details as why Japanese Adm. Yamamoto Isoroku ordered the attack in the first place. Answer: Because the United States had embargoed exports of steel, scrap iron and airplane parts needed for Japan’s brutal conquest of northern French Indochina. By wiping out the U.S. Pacific fleet, he believed, he could buy time, and later sue for peace in Washington. America’s resolve to squelch a ruthless foe proved him wrong.

Then came Sept. 11, and Pearl Harbor was back in the news. Headlines of the surprise terrorist attacks read like those of Dec. 8, 1941. (The Bangor Daily News’ Page One banner: “U.S. and Japan at war; Grim war explodes in Pacific as treacherous Nipponese bomb Honolulu and Pearl Harbor base.”) So did some of the news stories, such as the one about guarding the local waterworks against sabotage.

George Bush’s Sept. 20 address to Congress, with its catch phrase – “… I will not yield. I will not rest. I will not relent in waging this struggle for the freedom and security of the American people.” – reminded many of FDR’s seven-minute speech of Dec. 8: “No matter how long it may take us to overcome this premeditated invasion, the American people in their righteous might will win through to absolute victory.”

Orr’s name probably won’t be read at this noon’s Pearl Harbor Day ceremony, held by veterans groups at the Kenduskeag Stream walkway in downtown Bangor. The slaughter at Pearl Harbor claimed many young lives like Orr’s, and scarred countless others who survived the inferno. But despite the passage of time, it’s important to remember how they lived as well as how they died in a tropical paradise turned hellish one Sunday morning 60 years ago.